As well as working with UK fleets on EV adoption, FPS has since our inception supported international development projects through technology, analysis and knowledge sharing. We do this because the transition to net zero must be both equitable and technically feasible everywhere for it to be a success.

Cold Chain: Critical Infrastructure for Development

Most of our development work relates to logistics and more specifically the cold chain. The cold chain is critical in economies like the UK providing food security and pathways to market for billions of pounds worth of produce. 

In countries like Rwanda, where FPS was working this week, the lack of a cold chain acts as a barrier to development. Today food loss in the supply chain equates to about 21% of the country’s land use and a 12% reduction in GDP. Loss on this scale directly reduces the income of farmers, co-operatives, food processors and exporters. Additionally, the loss of produce and income undermines the case for investment in equipment and prevents actors moving up the value chain.

Rwanda’s Agricultural Transformation and the Cold Chain

FPS was working in Rwanda this week with our partners from the Clean Cooling Network (CCN), Africa Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling (ACES), UNEP and Defra. We were developing plans for how best to deliver Rwanda’s five-year strategic plan for agriculture (PSTA 5) that aims to create agricultural GDP growth and export income as well as addressing food security and nutritional outcomes. 

For me, the event was both eye opening and inspiring, ACES had convened a very broad group of stakeholders representing producer co-operatives, logistics businesses, exporters, academics, NGOs and policy makers. These groups in many cases had not been able to co-operate previously and so discussing challenges and opportunities with them for the first time led to two days of highly engaging debate.

There were many useful outputs that will no doubt guide the future work of ACES and CCN, but my key take-aways from the event were:

• The Cold Chain is Critical – delegates consistently ranked lack of a functioning cold chain as a major barrier to agricultural revenue growth, export growth, job creation, food security, nutritional outcomes and even empowerment of women.
• Training and Skills are Key – multiple examples emerged of cold chain equipment being deployed by businesses or NGOs and then falling out of use. Time and again lack of local maintenance capability was raised as a challenge. So, ACES training 200 technicians a month at their facility in Kigali is a very welcome contribution.
• Everyone wants finance, but they need business models – capital investments are hampered by a lack of access to finance. However, to attract finance viable business models that can support repayments are essential. A further challenge is how to drive sufficient scale and co-operation into transactions so that the myriad risks they face can be brought down to bankable levels.
• Co-operation is key – few of the participants had ever been in the same room or had the opportunity to explore how they could co-operate to reduce barriers to growth. A recurring theme was the potential for co-operation to:
  • Bring down cold chain costs through aggregation and shared use
  • Avoid market failures by democratising knowledge about available products and market demand.

The Wider Clean Cooling Network Agenda

This workshop acted as a kick off for a new phase of a wider programme of UNEP funded activities taking place. The programme uniquely combines in country actions with best-in-class UK and EU based multi-disciplinary research to advance state of the art in the sector.

FPS is contributing to the programme by leading work streams in the field of sustainable logistics and digital platforms. I’ll share more information about these in a subsequent post.

In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about the programme and its goals please visit https://cleancooling.org/ or contact l.sayin@bham.ac.uk.